THE AMOROUS ADVENTURES OF JULIANA L., PART 6 by Anna_Roid

Her flight had been delayed the previous night, and I let her lie in late before calling her hotel.Apparently I wasn’t quite late enough. Her voice was thick and muddy with sleep on the phone.

“ ‘Ullo?”

“Your escort awaits, ma’am,” I said.

“Juliana!” I could hear the sudden surge of energy in her voice, as though she’d only actually woken up just now. “Is that you? Really you?”

“Kittykat,” I said, grinning with pleasure into the phone. “Were you expecting someone else?”

“I can’t wait to meet you. When are you coming over?”

I went to the window and looked out over the city. In the distance, I could see her hotel, a block of grey and white concrete towering over the skyline. Perhaps we were looking at each other across the kilometres, all unknowing. “You tell me. I await your pleasure.”

“Come over right now. I’ll go have a bath and freshen up.”

I looked down at the street and estimated the time it would take from the traffic conditions. “I’ll be there in three quarters of an hour.”

Driving across the city, I felt a pleasant tingling in my breasts as the distance between us shrank with each turn of the tyres. We’d met online, in a writing group on a website now long dead. I’d not fit in particularly well with the rest of the members of the group; people who apparently wrote only for the sake of the praise of other members, not to improve their own writing or give honest criticism which might help me improve. I’d been on the point of quitting the group altogether when I’d got a private message from her.

I still recall frowning at the computer screen as I read the name on the message. Star? Who on earth was Star? Was this some kind of scam? I was on the verge of deleting it unread, and then decided to open it anyway. If it was a scammer, I might at least get some harmless fun out of stringing him or her along.

It wasn’t a scammer. “Hi,” she wrote. “We haven’t met before. I’ve been busy at work these last weeks and didn’t have much time to come online – so I only just got the chance to read your submissions. They caught my attention at once. We need to talk.”

We talked. “This group isn’t much, I know,” she said. “I don’t like the narcissists much either. They seem to demand worship rather than actual readership, if you know what I mean.”

I’d chuckled when I’d read that. It was exactly what I’d been thinking, only I hadn’t put it into so many words. “Besides, they’re mostly prudes and get offended if I get racy, so I have to tone it down,” she added.

“Racy?” I’d asked. “What do you mean?”

“I write a lot of erotica,” she’d informed me. “I like sex, and I like writing about it. You aren’t put off by that, are you?”

This time I’d laughed aloud. Put off by erotica! “Not at all,” I’d assured her. “Why would I be?”

“Good. I’m glad you aren’t. So let’s do this: we’ll ignore the rest of these peoples’ carping and carry on with reading each other and commenting on how we can make our writing better. Is that all right?”

“That’s more than all right,” I’d said.

That had been years ago. Shortly after, the moderator of the writing group had thrown a hissy fit and blocked us both without a word of explanation, which didn’t matter much because by then we were communicating with each other mostly by private messages and email anyway. She was an excellent editor, with a keen eye for redundant verbiage and a good sense of how a story might be improved. What I brought to the table I really didn’t know; it seemed to me that her stories were mostly beyond criticism, but she assured me that I was a great help.

“If you say it’s all right,” she told me once, “I know it’s all right. Do you get my meaning?”

Back then we’d both been in other relationships; relationships, as it happened, which were crumbling to dust. Hers ended first, in a messy divorce, and I let her sob on my virtual shoulder until the ache eventually faded and she healed. My own boyfriend, meanwhile, decided, after five months together, that I wasn’t the person he wanted to share his bed with, and dumped me by text message while I was at work; and you can imagine what that made me feel like. It was Star who’d held out a hand to pull me out. (Regular readers of this series will be well aware that Star is not her real name.)

“You’ve got to live again,” she’d said. “Find pleasure in what is, not what was.”

“How?”

“Let’s write a story together.”

And so, little by little, I came back into the light. By then I’d named Star “Kittykat”; I have an inveterate habit of giving personal nicknames to people I like, nicknames which have meaning only for me. She’d laughed when I’d called her that for the first time. (And Kittykat isn’t the actual nickname I gave her, either, in case anyone’s wondering.)

“Kittykat? Why Kittykat? Do I look like a Kittykat to you?”

“What’s a Kittykat supposed to look like?” I’d challenged. “Anyway, you’re Kittykat now, so you might as well get used to it.”

And then there was a time when we’d both got very busy with work and other things, and our conversations had slackened off. When I had a little time free, she had none; when she was free, I wasn’t. Months passed, and dragged on for almost a year.

One evening I found myself sitting in front of my computer, going through old files, when I found that first story we’d written together, and it sent a pang through me. I’d gone online and straight to my email account, meaning to write her a mail.

An email from her was already there. “Thinking of you…” it began.

“I’m finally done with all this,” she wrote. “All the craziness, the months of insanity, it’s all over. Now, at last, I can take this holiday I’ve been dreaming of for years. And guess where I want to go? Will you make yourself free to spend time with me?”

“Whenever you want,” I’d replied at once. “Your wish is my command, my queen.”

She knew, of course, that I was bisexual, and said that though she’d only ever had sex with men, she had often wondered what it might be like to sleep with a woman. She’d even been made advances to by women a couple of times, but backed out because she wasn’t sure what to do.

“Also,” she said, “I’m used to being naked with men, but I’m not certain what it’d be like to strip in front of a woman. Women can be so judgemental, and I’m getting old and fat.”

“I won’t be judgemental,” I promised her. “Why don’t you send me a couple of nude photos if you want an honest opinion?”

After some hesitation, she did. One was of her standing naked in front of a fireplace, hands behind her head to thrust her breasts forward, with a shy smile on her face. The other was from below and between her thighs, looking up past her vulva at her face framed by her breasts, nipples outthrust.

“You’re extremely good looking,” I assured her with complete honesty. The sight of her labia, dark brown and peeking out from her pubic hair, had made me go wet between the legs. “You don’t have a thing to worry about.”

“At least I won’t be ashamed if I need to get naked in front of you,” she responded. “You’ve seen everything already.”

The rush of memories had occupied me right across town, so that the usual insane traffic hadn’t even exasperated me as it usually did. When I drew up at the hotel, the pleasant tingling of anticipation had intensified into a hammering of my heart. Absurdly, I felt like a teenager on her first date. I took a deep breath to calm down before reaching for my mobile phone.

“I’m here,” I said when she replied. “Are you ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” she said. “I’m coming down.”

I was waiting in the lobby when she emerged from the lift. The photos I’d seen of her, clothed and otherwise, hadn’t done her justice, though, not fully; they hadn’t shown how regal she was, how she carried herself like an empress. An empress of the night, her black skin offset by the green and purple dress she wore.

Then she saw me and the almost intimidating queenly air was gone, wiped away by a huge grin. “Juliana! There you are at last.”

I held out my arms and she rushed into them, hugging me tight. It had been a very long time since I’d hugged someone, and I held her, taking in the pleasure of feeling her warmth, the smell of her hair and perfume, and the pressure of her breasts against mine.

“Let’s go,” she said at last, breaking the embrace. “We’ll go eat something first. I’m starving.”

That’s how the day started. We had breakfast sitting opposite each other in a little cafe, the waitress darting puzzled looks our way. She was probably wondering what we were doing together, the tall black woman and the younger brown woman who’d kicked off her sandals as soon as she’d sat down. We ignored her, ate our pastries and drank our Cappuccinos.

I don’t recall much of that first conversation; perhaps I might have seemed stupid to her. I just sat across her, listening to her husky voice, telling myself that after a long, long time I was with a friend, someone I could be comfortable with, someone I didn’t have to always feel as though I was walking on eggshells around.

At one point she put her hand on the table, and I reached out and took it, almost afraid that she would snatch it away. She let me hold it, and even squeezed my fingers gently.

“Don’t look so tense,” she said. “I’m not going to bite.”

Later we drove around the city. It was only the first day of her holiday, and we had the whole two weeks ahead of us, so we didn’t enter any of the museums and the old cathedral which stood to the south, its huge spire always reminding me of a titanic shark fin cruising out to sea. And then we drove down to the beach out of town, where the waters of the ocean heaved back and forth and crashed ceaselessly on the shore.